`Parker' Captures The Movie Maven And The `Loudmouths'

May 19, 1995|By Donald Liebenson.Special to the Tribune.

Dorothy Parker had a love-hate relationship with Hollywood. She loved the easy money she could make writing for the movies. She hated almost everything else about the place--even the palms, which she described as "the ugliest vegetable God created."

"Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle," available this week on videocassette, begins in Hollywood, where she toils unhappily script doctoring "happy endings" and not-so-fondly remembering the golden age of the fabled Algonquin Round Table.

In his autobiography, Harpo Marx called the raconteurs and conversationalists that frequented the Round Table "the brightest and most famous delinquents of the 1920s." Parker, portrayed by Jennifer Jason-Leigh in a tour-de-force performance that earned her Best Actress honors from the Chicago Film Critics Association, dismissed them as "just a bunch of loudmouths showing off" and herself as "a party girl and smartass."

Parker may have been disenchanted by her sojourn in "The Isle of Do-What's-Done-Before," but the films to which she contributed are part of her legacy, along with her short stories, poems, reviews and oft-quoted quips that established her as America's wittiest woman.

Among her most memorable film work available on videocassette is the 1937 Fredric March and Janet Gaynor version of "A Star Is Born," for which she and her husband, Alan Campbell, were nominated for an Academy Award. The New York Times called this bite-the-hand-that-feeds drama "the most accurate mirror ever held before the glittering, tinseled, trivial, generous, cruel and ecstatic world that is Hollywood."

She also collaborated on Alfred Hitchcock's "Saboteur." Her touch is most keenly felt in a scene in which couple-on-the-run Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane take refuge on a train only to find themselves in the car for circus freaks. Among them are Siamese twins who are not on speaking terms.

"I wish you'd tell her to do something about her insomnia," one says. "I do nothing but toss and turn all night."

That's Parker riding in a car alongside Hitchcock. They pass obliviously as Cummings tries to wrestle Lane into his car before she can turn him into the police. "My," Parker observes, "they must be in love."

Another regular at the Round Table was George S. Kaufman, one of Broadway's most celebrated playwrights. He shared Parker's view of the film industry. "Who wants to look at shadows when he can see the real thing?" he once said.

But he, too, profited greatly from films that were adapted from his plays, including Frank Capra's screwball classic, "You Can't Take It With You," "Dinner at Eight," "Stage Door," starring Katharine Hepburn and the Ginger Rogers, and "The Cocoanuts" and "Animal Crackers," starring the Marx Brothers.

Kaufman also wrote perhaps the Brothers' best film, "A Night at the Opera," his only original screenplay. In "The Man Who Came to Dinner," Kaufman immortalized one of the Round Table's most outrageous characters, critic Alexander Wolcott, who once stated, "All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral or fattening." Wolcott inspired the character of Sheridan Whiteside, an imperious and pompous critic who takes over a Midwestern family's home when he injured while on tour.

Charles MacArthur, portrayed in "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" by Matthew Broderick, co-wrote with fellow former Chicago journalist Ben Hecht the cynical classic "The Front Page." Counting the Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner fiasco "Switching Channels," it has been remade four times. All are available on video, but stick with the 1931 original starring Adolph Menjou and Howard Hawks' gender-bending 1940 remake, "His Girl Friday," starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.

MacArthur also wrote "The Sin of Madelon Claudet," which earned an Academy Award for Helen Hayes, one of the few actresses allowed to frequent the Round Table. Another was Ruth Gordon, who co-wrote with husband Garson Kanin the romantic comedies that defined the genre, including the Spencer Tracy-Hepburn films "Pat and Mike" and "Adam's Rib."

At the heart of "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" is Parker's friendship with and unrequited love for the gentle humorist Robert Benchley. Had the film fared better at the box office, it might have spurred the release of his comedy short subjects.

These and more obscure films of the Round Table, including "Suzy," starring Cary Grant and Jean Harlow, and "Merton of the Movies," starring Red Skelton, are available for sale or rental from Facets Multimedia 1-800-331-6197.